A different kind of dishonesty
"Lying" is a funny word because it's not very precisely defined. Harry G. Frankfurt's essay, On Bullshit, is a rare glimpse of clarity inside an otherwise muddy world. Much like debates about "consciousness," discussions of "dishonesty" are often merely wrestling with definitions.
I want to discuss a different kind of dishonesty, the dishonesty of social fluidity. Much of speech is sort of like a dance. Or maybe like a call and response. You don't just blindly say what you're thinking. Much speech is constrained by the prompt you're given. If someone says "hello, how are you?", you cannot (or at least should not) respond "I like turtles!" Normal, socially fluid people don't really struggle with this, and I would argue that a lot of mundane speech is littered with benign little lies.
What I'm attempting to describe in people is something I lack, so I'm describing it from an outsider's perspective. Whenever someone describes a phenomenon from an outside perspective, they risk sounding either weird or incorrect even if there is some validity to their point. A good example might be one of my relatives. She doesn't like me very much, and unrelated to her dislike of me, she seems to lack the ability to be honest or candid. For her, the purpose of a statement seems to be elicit the desired response. (Harry G. Frankfurt would call her more of a bullshitter than a liar) Whether or not a statement is a lie seems to be irrelevant; what matters is whether the desired response occurred.
What's interesting is that in her case, I don't believe she thinks she's being dishonest. She is also almost certainly on the autism spectrum, and you cannot describe her dishonesty to her in a way that she recognizes. Any attempts just make her think that you are being crazy. My current theory is as follows:
- she lacks the introspection to tell the difference between what she really thinks and what she is expected to say.
- being at least somewhat autistic, nearly all speech seems to have a "dishonesty" requirement for her. In modern internet parlance she is always "masking."
My claim would be that a normal, socially fluid person understands when to play long for social fluidity and when to switch to candor and honesty. For her, it seems like there is no honesty. I would claim her internal position is something like: "People are just a mystery, and the way you work with them is to find the words they want to hear. If things go poorly in a conversation, you must not have found the right words. Keep trying to find the words that the recipient needs, and then you will eventually find success." If I'm correct, it's an interesting strategy, as people on the autism spectrum are usually uncomfortably honest; they blurt out subtext which was never meant to be made explicit. Or, they blurt out some utterance that reflects whatever they were thinking about, but has nothing to do with the conversation at hand. (eg: I like turtles!) As far as I can tell, she's stuck attempting to parrot social fluidity, and so is stuck never conveying her personally-held beliefs. In a baffling turn of events, she doesn't see this as a gap, and if anything sees honesty as something to be stringently avoided.
I also have a coworker who is pretty socially fluid, and definitely more socially fluid than I am. He's a good person, but I struggle with him sometimes. He'll lie in little ways that again, would not really be seen as lies by most people. They're little affirmations, or they're social lubricant. But they almost certainly cannot be a literal reflection of his internal thoughts. Specifically, one of the phrases he utters most at work is "I was thinking the same thing." This phrase seems to have a few purposes, "translated" from social metaphor to literal speech below:
- "My colleague just gave a good recap, and I don't have anything additional to add."
- "My colleague said something which seems to have sounded intelligent or go over well, and I am simultaneously supporting the belief while also smuggling a small amount of credit for the idea back to myself."
- And sometimes, "I just like that idea and this is how I show that I think it's good."
I've sort of painted a negative or manipulative lens on my colleague's behavior, and I think this is where I get pretty stuck. If you confronted him about dishonesty he would be more surprised and confused than anything else. Really, the person confronting him would probably get in trouble at work. He doesn't seem to be making these tiny little lies with any sort malicious intent. (And in fact, when presented with opportunities for more substantial manipulation, he has never taken them. Like I said, he's a good guy.) What makes this difficult for me is that his statements are almost certainly not true in the literal sense. Many, many times when he has said "I was thinking the same thing," he almost certainly was not thinking the same thing. Is this a verbal tick? Is he intelligent but lacks introspection? All I know is that I'm the only one who picks up on this small, socially fluid dishonesty.
Now, in contrast to my female relative, my coworker can actually code switch back to honesty. Like I said, he seems to be socially fluid, and understands when to use one and when to use the other.
There's also no way to surface the dishonesty. People would rightly believe ("rightly," viewed from the lens of what I assume is normal social fluidity) I was just being crazy. A good man would be wounded and surprised. I really don't understand normal people. Why would a pleasing lie be so palatable? Why would you use an emotional metaphor which contains some dishonesty when a more literal statement is just as easily as accessible? I suspect the answer to this question is similar to "why do you like vanilla ice cream?" There's some biological answer (ie, an evolutionary psychology answer about ancestors living in a resource-scarce environment and being selected for loving high calorie food.) but that can never help me understand the "lived experience answer." ie, what would it feel like to appreciate a metaphorical white lie rather than the literal truth? (and, as I can report, to detest literal truths and wish that I would just switch to little metaphorical white lies?)
That last part (ie, that I cannot really experience would it would be like to enjoy socially fluid white lies is part of what gives me so much trouble. People don't hate me, and a lot of people try to find the words to say something nice to me. And being socially fluid, they say things which are not literally true. There is a metaphorical meaning underneath I cannot process that metaphorical meaning in real time. So instead of accepting a nice compliment, I get wrapped up in attempting to detect their deception, but most importantly, I don't register happiness on my face, and they realize their compliment has landed poorly and they don't know why. A normal person is usually just wondering why I'm making things so difficult, and I'm usually wondering why they so afraid of being more candid and direct.